Amilcar Cabral, the Theory as a Weapon of the Oppressed and Africa’s Predicament Today

Abstract

This chapter seeks to contribute to efforts in search of a fundamental transformation of a euromodern political economy that normalizes inequality and hierarchy as universal logics. A critical part of this is to break bread with the neglected and silenced revolutionary and radical thought born of the terrible predicament that this political economy imposes upon the global South and Africa, in particular. This is because we must move from demanding decolonial paradigm shifts to demonstrating the value of thought outside Eurocentrism in what Lewis R. Gordon calls shifting the geography of reason. At very fundamental level the political economy we refer to is essentially a product of thought, of reason, and logics associated with the rise of euromodernity from the late fifteenth century. This chapter distils from Cabral’s Weapon of Theory essay critical of Afro-decolonial theses on the political-economic predicament in Africa today in the hope that this transcends the dead-ends that mark dominant paradigms on African political economy.